An excerpt from The Depths of Norhaven: A Complete Guide, Volume Five – Of the Cleansing and the Hunters, by Alerdy Parlyle.-...without whose help we would have surely lost all knowledge on the subject. His time, after all, was the time of the Cleansing, and the time of Hunters. That men of learning like himself managed to survive those terrible times is a testament to his skill and fortitude. Many, however, were not so fortunate.
The Cleansing was not an entirely unexpected event. For years since the settling of the underground colonies, a plague of rumors had spread amongst the various peoples and places. These rumors said that the Dragon Queen had not yet given up on destroying the last ramshackle remnants of the once-great civilizations of the surface; that, even now, she was plotting and planning and scheming to undo every last great work forged by the hands of Allkind. Some discounted these whispers, hoping that the dreaded surface and its Wyrm were now distant memories, and continued on forging their new lives. Others heard them and were afraid. Fear bred into a quiet, simmering paranoia. The whispers increased. Some claimed they had seen men with the eyes of wyrms that walked amongst the colonies, unseen and unnoticed. Others claimed to have heard unearthly wyrmcries from empty homes and abandoned caverns. Whatever the truth of the matter, the paranoia merely waited, slumbering as it nestled beneath the earth.
There is no real consensus as to what awakened the brooding fear once more within the people of the colonies. The hushed rumors of before soon became tavernside conversation, spoken openly and proudly. Men began to meet in hushed corners and backrooms and made proposals against their neighbors. A new threat, they said, had come to the colonies, arriving in the form of wyrms who wore the skin of men. Evidence - possibly forged - was produced, and soon the quiet mutterings became a roar of madness. Leading the charge against those who society turned against were men known as “Hunters.” Many began as simple, charismatic leaders, armed with the same knives and spears as the rest of the brutal mob. A few displayed actual tact and cunning, tracking their fleeing quarry through the depths. Their targets were the pariahs of society: Kobolds, lunatics, mages, the diseased, the desperate. Some were mercifully sent off with a bolt to the heart, though more were often sentenced to a slow death by roasting pyres (a show of strength against the Dragon Queen, they said). Some of the greatest minds of society were wiped away in an instant by the madness, which soon began to burn both the innocent and the wise, as they objected to the senseless murders they bore witness to. Some authorities sought to control the tide of blood; others gained prominence by directly supporting it.
Only a few brave men managed to stay above the rage that consumed the rest of society. Fitting for an outsider, the noble Wyrmbane, a Gaunt by birth, though a true colonist by anyone's regard, managed to maintain the original ethos of the Hunters, and brought his considerable skills against the true Wyrmbloods that had begun to crawl within society. He was credited over the Cleansing with at least thirty-seven noted executions of true Wyrmbloods, all of which he carefully and painstakingly provided evidence for: the nubs of horns on their foreheads, scales on their skin, and the small stubs of tails that had begun to form on their bodies. In many cases, these Wyrmbloods knew little of what they were changing into, and he ensured that their deaths were mercifully swift, as a result. Yet he is, sadly, one of the few exceptions, rather than the rule, during the Cleansing.
As all madness does, the Cleansing eventually subsided, but it had scarred civilization in the depths irreversibly. Most of the learned of society had fled within the depths of the Warrens to Chanderwick Keep, where the Convocation sheltered them from the rage of the vast mobs outside, and there was a hole of knowledge that plagued most of the colonies, one which the Convocation was eager to fill. The Cleansing imbued the colony dwellers with a deep-seated terror that such a thing might happen again, and instilled within them a distrust of their neighbors, many of whom had turned on their own friends to save themselves from the howling fires. It would take a long time for the wounds left by the Hunters to heal even partially, and always were they in danger of being reopened with but a single cut.
And what of the Hunters themselves? Some returned to merely being citizens, impossible as such a thing was for men with so much blood on their palms. Others continued their hunting as loners, guided by instinct and an overriding sense of justice, evading those who would dare to stop them. Many, surprisingly, began to turn their specialized skills towards more practical usage: hunting the creatures of the depths. Supernatural forces constantly beguiled the colonies, as they do now, and the Hunters, well-equipped and well-trained in tracking and annihilating specific prey, were one of the few groups both willing and able to handle problems that the regular armies of the colonies couldn’t. They are still a common force in the depths, though one largely shunned, given their bloody past. It is an indisputable fact, however, that there is no one better equipped to handle the menacing darkness that lurks below the world than these bold men and women.
She had tracked her fugitive quarry all the way to the banks of the Lonely River before finally losing sight of him. The pursuit through the Baderast Passage had been simple enough, with every heavy footstep of her prey leaving a deep impression in the thick, sucking mud.
But there was nothing but hardpacked dirt in the tunnels ahead, next to the shoreline. The previously straight roadway now split into two equally wide passages. There were scuff marks on the ground, but Mercy had tracked enough around the Lonely River to know they could have come from any dozen traders or oarsmen you’d care to name.
The nearby lap of water was an unsettling reminder of her dilemma. The river was criss-crossed with oarsmen, many of whom asked few questions to a bag full of coins. Getting caught up to him now seemed a thoroughly remote possibility.
Mercy sighed heavily, leaning on her crossbow for support. The wood, already under tension from the drawstring, groaned in protest. She took off her hat, a dusty old thing with a peaked cap, and gave it a shake. A few loose pebbles caught in the brim tumbled to the ground, resting neatly in a clawed footprint.
She watched the pebbles intently as they fell neatly into the curved imprint of the nail. Gradually, she lifted herself off of her crossbow, hefting it over her shoulder, which managed to coerce another tight groan from the wood. It was almost unbelievable what she saw. She rubbed her blue-ringed eyes wearily, but the clawed footprint failed to vanish.
Mercy knew she was after a Wyrmblood, but all of the tracks she had followed before had been Human... hadn’t they? Or maybe there were a few that had curved a bit oddly, that had dug too deeply into the soil. She had heard that some Wyrmbloods manifested their change spontaneously, that their claws and tails simply sprouted like an unwelcome cyst - but that was surely just legend. A Wyrmblood would never risk revealing themselves like that.
Or would they?
It was all so uncertain. Everything had been uncertain in the life of Mercy. She could scarcely remember the young girl who was there before Mercy, and could barely recall where the name had even come from. There were vague half-thoughts, perhaps illusions, of a warm home, of simple chores, of watching the blue pyrelings over the shores of the Lonely River. All of them spiraled outside of a dark pit in her mind, when her father, a Hunter himself, was murdered in the Shadow Spiral. She had known - simply known - that it was the work of the Wyrmbloods he had hunted so thoroughly. Nothing civilized could have killed such a fine man, and any beast of the depths would have simply eaten the meat and left behind the bones, yet all that the Elothar had found was a tattered, wide-brimmed hat with a tapered top.
She pulled herself away from the darkness. A distant howl of unknown origin stiffened her spine. A wyrmcry - she was certain of it. She couldn’t let another one get away. Suppose it was her father’s murderer, and she let it slip away from her again? Blood always had to be repaid in kind. It was the way of the Hunter.
Wasting no time, she dropped into a running dash, sprinting towards the leftmost passage. It was a blind guess, but it was hardly the first time Mercy had ever guessed. She had an undeniable knack for it. It was, after all, a simple guess as to where the pariah she had heard of in Gauth would go to escape the watchful eyes of the citizenry that started this mad chase. Her boots pounded hard into the dust as she raced through the corridor, ducking under a stone overhang as she emerged into a voluminous cavern.
It was utterly silent, save for the distant drum of water on stone from the river somewhere beyond the stone walls. There were no obvious exits, aside from the one she had come from. There were numerous crevasses where even the dim light of the nearby luminous moss never reached. It was highly possible that her prey was in this room. It was equally possible that he wasn’t. She took another gamble.
Cautiously, she licked the finger of her gloved left hand, sticking it into a partly-open pouch on her belt. The emerging finger trailed silver dust, finely powdered. No Hunter could ever really say why it was only powdered silver that worked, though it certainly wasn’t from lack of trying. The glyphs were old, far older than any of the colonies, and were as inscrutable as whoever their creator was. All that the Hunters knew was that they worked, which was what mattered most.
With a well-trained hand, she began to trace an intricate glyph into the sand of the floor with her fingertip. Out of everything a Hunter trained for, it was the drawing of glyphs that took the greatest time to learn. Mercy had always taken a shining to them; perhaps, in a brighter age, she may have been an artist. But there was nothing in the savage underground that spoke to her soul any longer, nothing that demanded brush and paint. The glyphs were one of the few joys she experienced as a Hunter.
A faint glimmer caught the silver as the thick air of gathering aether began to build in the area. Her eyes traced every line twice, the coruscating edges of the glyph spreading into her vision. When she looked up, the cavern was now alive with the sights and sounds of the depths. She could see every hidden nook, hear every subtle drip of water. There was no hiding now, if, indeed, there was anything to even find here.
She cocked her crossbow as she crept about the cavern, spinning around every corner, expecting the worst from her quarry. Eventually, a small crevasse carved by a slow flow of water from above bore fruit. Stifled breathing quickly gave him away, and the sight of her crossbow pointing at him elicited a gasp from the fugitive.
He looked... different than what she had expected. Slender and withered, clothing torn and mended in a hundred different places. She glanced down briefly at his feet; they were human enough. Had she been imagining those clawprints? There wasn’t much to suggest anything Wyrmblooded about him, but the local butcher and his wife, both respectable and trustworthy people by all accounts, had sworn to Eradus that they saw him breathing ice and shedding scales.
“P-please!” stammered the fugitive, trying desperately to push down the wall he huddled against with his back alone. “I’m not a Wyrm! Never ‘ave been! I’m a weaver! I’m-”
The sharp tip of a crossbow bolt pointed at his face blunted any further protest. The fugitive gulped apologetically.
“I’m not interested in lies, Wyrmblood. I’m interested in a confession,” said Mercy.
"Please! You have to protect me! It's
after-"
"Confession!" yelled Mercy, crossbow jutting forwards to punctuate the sentence.
“I have nothing to confess! Not to you, or to your... your damned partner!” replied the man, trying further to merge with the stone wall blocking his retreat.
The bolt tip in front of the fugitive’s face raised slightly. “Partner?” said Mercy.
The man’s eyes widened. There was a sudden click in the darkness. He turned to face it.
The bolt hit him cleanly between the eyes. There was barely any noise aside from the uncomfortable crack of bone. Mercy stood in stark silence as her prey hit the floor with a wet, decisive thump. Her own bolt still quavered in its drawstring, waiting for what was now an increasingly unlikely release.
Out from the darkness stepped a wide-brimmed hat, hiding a rather hideous face. Her eyes widened. It was unmistakably Wyrmbane. She had grown up on legends of him, an unstoppable guardian of the darkness, dedicated to eradicating the threat of Grehta. She had seen him only once before, but the last meeting had permanently etched itself on her mind. He strode with the confidence of a mountain, his crossbow, Wyrmripper, hanging by his side idly. A terrible gyre of emotion welled up within her: exuberance at meeting her idol face-to-face, and disappointment for having stolen her kill.
Their eyes met for a few brief moments. It was impossible to read the man, his pupils hidden well by the shade of his hat’s brim, but he looked... content. There was a strange look - questioning, perhaps? - that crossed his face briefly before he gently tipped his hat and wandered back through the corridors. It took mere moments before his footprints became hollow echoes within the cavern, now once more still as a grave.
Mercy sat down hard upon the stone, rubbing her brow. Her body ached, as well as her soul, the bitter disappointment of having lost much and gained little. She glanced over to the dead man sprawled on the ground, his empty eyes offering little sympathy. His blood was busying itself dripping down the brown stone and mingling with the few trickling streams falling from above. A bit of it had stained her glove, which she quickly washed, before picking up her crossbow once more.
She knew, after all, that a Hunter’s work was never done.
